Sep 24 How This Was Lit: Elisha Knight Combines Ambient And Flash For Drama

I recently won the prestigious 2017 APA Award in the Student/Emerging category. This was such a surprise to me and an incredible honor to be recognized alongside so many great photographers. Because of this award, I decided to create a breakdown of how I made the winning photograph.

About the setup: The light that was used was a Yongnuo Speedlite YN560-III with a 47in off-brand octa.The lighting setup was so simple. The light was setup outside of the back window of the car. I used the speedlight on a low power setting with the 47in diffused octa. I wanted to invite in as much ambient light as I could to create a more natural, yet moody feel to the image. I used the artificial light to create dimension on Andrea's face.

The fill on the right was simply natural light.

Shooting: We were there with Andrea for 30min trying to start his car and get it out of his garage, once we got set up for the actual shoot it took maybe 15min. This was one of my first experiences in knowing 100% that I got the shot I was looking for. We played around with a couple ways of sitting in the car. We started with Andrea sitting in the front driver's seat but felt that it just wasn't strong enough. I knew I wanted to get more of the car in the shot so I moved him to the back seat and played around with various angles, compositions, and focal lengths there. I chose to shoot at 24mm for a wider, more cinematic look.

Lighting Diagram:

Post Production: To continue the cinematic look that I got in camera I wanted to create a cinematic color grade. I wanted the overall color to be cyan/yellow to compliment the prominent reds and blues in the image. I neutralized and did a slight color grade in camera raw but I brought it into Photoshop to really make the color pop.

Raise your hand if you think I photographed this in the middle of a snowy field? Well... I'm going to let you in on a little secret... the location is totally fake. Because it was a snowy afternoon in Chicago, Andrea didn't feel comfortable driving his car anywhere. We ended up just pulling it out into the alley outside of his garage and shot there. So originally, outside that window was the side of a cream-colored house. Blah... I then went on to Google images and searched for a snowy scene that had the same gloomy feeling as the weather that day. I spent a decent amount of time color-matching the scene to the color originally outdoors so there wasn't a huge disconnect from the window to the highlights inside the car. I also wanted to keep the snow that was already on the window so I basically blended the cream-colored house to the background image. To keep it looking real I gave the background image a slight blur to mimic depth of field. Considering this was one of my first composites, I was pretty proud of how well it turned out. Finally, a little bit of dodge and burn, curves, and sharpening and it's complete!